Psalm 51 with R. C. Sproul, “Purging the Inward Parts”, 5

True Repentance and the Inward Parts in Psalm 51

We're going to continue today with our study of the penitential psalm of David, Psalm 51, where we get an insight into what true repentance is, as the words of the psalm are inspired by the Holy Spirit.

In our last session, we looked at verse 5, in which David confessed not only the actual sin that he had committed, but also confessed that he was a person who was born in sin, that he had a sin nature, and he confessed that in verse 5, saying, Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.

Truth in the Inward Parts and the Heart

Let's move on then today in verse 6, where we read, Behold, you desire truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part you will make me to know wisdom. I find it interesting here that David says to the Lord, not only, God, I know that what You want and what You desire from us is truth, but he adds to it truth in the inward parts, truth that is not just a matter of superficial, extraneous things, but something that comes from the very depths of our being.

The Old Testament frequently made reference to this kind of truth, where we read, for example, that as a man thinks in his heart, so is he. Now, when the Scripture says that, that as a man thinks in his heart, so is he, it's not that the Old Testament people imagined that the heart was the organ of thinking and not the brain.

They understood that thought was in the mind and not in the heart, and that the heart was the organ that pumped blood throughout the body. But what they mean when they speak that way as Hebrews is that there are ideas or concepts or truths that we entertain on the surface of our thinking, but they never penetrate to the bloodstream.

They never pierce our soul and take a hold of us so that they become the control principles for how we behave. But what the Old Testament writer is saying is that when those ideas get from the mind and penetrate to the core of our being, to our hearts, then that's what dictates our behavior.

In that sense, as a man thinks in the depth dimension, as the man thinks in his heart, then that's how he will behave. And this is what David is recognizing here in his repentance, that this sin that he had committed with Bathsheba revealed that there was something profoundly wrong at the middle or at the core of his being.

That sin comes from the depth of our being and is not just accidental or on the peripheral aspects of human life. And he said, God, You desire truth in the inward parts. Let me just call attention for a second to a conversation that Jesus has with the scribes and the Pharisees that's recorded for us in the New Testament in the Gospel of Matthew where He says to the Pharisees in verse 8 of chapter 15, these people draw near to Me with their mouth, and they honor Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me.

And in vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. And when He had said these things, He called the multitude to Himself and said to them, Hear and understand, it's not what goes into a man's mouth that defiles a man, but what comes out of his mouth, this defiles a man.

And the disciples then came and said to Jesus, Do You know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying? And He answered and said, Every plant which My heavenly Father has not planted will be.

Uprooted.

Let them alone. They are blind leaders of the blind, and if the blind leads the blind, both will fall into a ditch. And Jesus, after He said this, Peter replied and asked Him to explain it to him. Jesus said, Are you still without understanding?

Do you not yet understand that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and is eliminated? But those things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile.

A man.

For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemy. These are the things that defile a man. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man.

I mean, this was the theme that we hear repeatedly, particularly in the Gospel of Matthew, from the lips of Jesus as He confronted the scribes and the Pharisees. Now these are the clergy of the day, and Jesus' chief criticism of them was for their hypocrisy.

And what a hypocrite was in the ancient world was really an actor, a person who played a role, who was involved in pretending. And the Pharisees had this pretense of righteousness. On the outside they seemed to be paragons of virtue, but Jesus said it was all show.

It was all surface. They were like whited sepulchre that had been painted spotlessly white on the outside, but inside, underneath the surface, they were filled with dead men's bones. Jesus said to them, they cleaned the outer portion of the plate, but they did not have truth in the inward parts.

And when a person is truly repentant, it's not a superficial thing. And David acknowledges, God, You want from me not a performance. You don't want me just to be play-acting as a righteous man or as a penitent man.

You want truth from me, and You want it to proceed from the very center of my being. And then he goes on and says, and in the hidden part, You will make me to know wisdom. So the renewal that David is looking for is a renewal that will come from the center of who he is that will then give a whole new pattern of behavior for the future.

Now he again turns to the metaphor of cleansing, which he's already used on one occasion in.

The prayer.

Hyssop, Leprosy, and Thorough Cleansing

In verse 7, he says, Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Well, I find it fascinating that he appeals here to a cleansing substance that is called hyssop, because we find that earlier in the Old Testament integrated into the religious rites and cleansing rites of Israel.

If we go back to the 14th chapter, if we may for a moment, of the book of Leviticus. Chapter 14 of Leviticus verse 1 reads as follows,. And then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, This shall be the law of the leper for the day of his cleansing.

He shall be brought to the priest, and the priest shall go out of the camp, and the priest shall examine him. And indeed, if the leprosy is healed in the leper, then the priest shall command to take for him who is to be cleansed two living and clean birds, cedarwood, scarlet, and hyssop.

And the priest shall command that one of the birds be killed in an earthen vessel over.

Running water.

And as for the living bird, he shall take it, the cedarwood, the scarlet, and the hyssop, and dip them, and the living bird in the blood of the bird that was killed over the running water. Incidentally, the word there is baptize the bird.

And he shall sprinkle it seven times on him who is to be cleansed from the leprosy, and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living bird loose in the open field. Now, when people today read these texts in Leviticus, for example, most Christians, if they have decided and determined they're going to read the Bible through, they do well through Genesis and Exodus, but as soon as they get to these detailed instructions of ritual cleansing and so on, that's when they get off the boat and they give up because they find this tedious going.

But if you can read it existentially, in the sense of what was really going on then, just imagine that you have been diagnosed with leprosy, and you've submitted yourself to treatment, and now it seems that you've been healed from this most dreadful disease.

That disease where people who contracted it would have to go about in groups isolated from the rest of the community, and when a healthy person came nearby, the leper would have to shout out from a distance, unclean, unclean, to warn people of the horror of the disease that had invaded his body.

But now the person suspects that perhaps he is now healed, and so the instructions of the law require that he go to the priest who is functioning really as the doctor on this occasion to see if he is indeed healed.

And if he is, then he goes through these prescribed rituals of cleansing. And so there's nothing tedious about it for a person in that situation. And so as he's following the directions here, we read again in verse 7, he shall sprinkle it seven times on him who is to be cleansed from the leprosy, and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living bird loose in the open field, and he who is to be cleansed shall wash his clothes, shave off all his hair, wash himself in water, that he may be clean.

And after that he shall come into the camp, and shall stay outside his tent seven days. On the seventh day he shall shave off the hair from his head, his beard and his eyebrows, all of the hair he shall shave off.

He shall wash his clothes, wash his body in water, and he shall be clean. So that what is going on here is a cleansing that is repeated, and a cleansing that is thorough to make sure that there isn't the slightest trace of this leprosy left on the man's body, in his hair, or in his clothes.

And this is what David is saying, oh God, in Your sight I'm a leper. I need cleansing like the leper needs to be clean. Purge me with hyssop. That's the request, and I shall be clean, because God, I am dirty in Your sight.

You know, if we look at people's experiences of encountering the holiness of God in the and when they become acutely conscious of their sin. We see two desires that come to the fore over and over and over again.

One of them is the plea to be covered, and so much of the work of redemption in the Bible follows the metaphor of covering. Indeed, we recall that the very first act of redemption after Adam and Eve sinned in the garden, they became immediately conscious of their nakedness, and they were ashamed, and so they hid themselves from the presence of God.

And when God came and encountered them, and even though He rebuked them and placed His curse upon them, nevertheless He condescended, He stooped down, and He made clothes for His embarrassed creatures.

He covered their shame. And in that act of grace, He foreshadows the redemption of Christ, who provides a covering for our sinfulness, where we are told that all of our righteousness that we possess in and of ourselves is what?

Filthy rags. But God gives us the cloak or the robe of the righteousness of Christ to cover us. Even the Day of Atonement in the Old Testament was a covering rite, where the blood of the sacrifice was taken by the high priest into the Holy of Holies and poured out on the mercy seat, the covering of the law.

But the other metaphor that is used for renewal and redemption biblically, apart from the covering motif, is the cleansing motif. It's not by accident that the sacrament of the New Covenant, the sign of the New Covenant, is a washing rite.

It is the bath that signifies the labor of regeneration, the cleansing from sin, because not only does sin expose our shame, but it also soils our souls, as it were. And there is this sensation of the person who has been quickened by the Holy Ghost to a recognition of their sin of being dirty.

Again, Isaiah in the temple, woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips. My mouth is dirty.

I am not clean.

And that's how David is feeling here. He's feeling dirty. And God, He said, I want you to cleanse me to the same degree of thoroughness as you would a leper, purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean.

If you wash me, I shall be whiter than snow. And then He says, make me hear joy and gladness, that the bones you have broken may rejoice. There is an expression that has worked its way into Christian jargon in the second half of the twentieth century that some trace back to the middle of the century to the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, where Bonhoeffer complained about the prevalence in the church of his era of what he called cheap grace, a grace that is proclaimed to people without any call to repentance.

We say to people, God loves you unconditionally, and the unbelieving person, when he hears that announcement, hears the preacher saying, well, no matter what I do, I'm acceptable.

To God.

I really don't need to repent. And we are so zealous to win people to Christ that we'll conceal the requirement of repentance from them to make it easier. We want to facilitate a person's entrance into a saving relationship with Christ, and we don't want to bring up the unpleasant business of the need to repent.

Because repentance is painful. Here David speaks of it in terms of having his bones broken. He said, the bones that you have broken, O God. He realizes that the hand of God's judgment that came upon David was so pressure packed, so heavy upon him, that it was crushing him.

And so, he's asking God for relief from that conviction of sin. Make me hear joy and gladness. I haven't had a lot of joy, I haven't had a lot of gladness. I've been wallowing in my sin. I've been on my face before you.

I've been crying out with this burden of sin for which I've had no relief. It's ever before me. God, give me joy and gladness. Restore to me the joy of my salvation. For the bones that you have broken might rejoice again.

Conviction of Sin, Satan's Accusation, and Restoration

Now, let me say something here. One of the difficult things that the Christian has to be able to discern is the difference between the conviction of sin that is the work of the Holy Ghost and the accusation.

Of Satan.

We tend to think that the primary and perhaps even exclusive work of Satan in the life of the Christian is that of temptation, that he is the tempter who seeks to entice us into disobedience. And he does do those things.

We know that.

But perhaps his most devastating work in the life of the Christian is the work of accusation. Satan is the slanderer. He's the one who comes and calls attention to our sins. It was Satan who came to the high priest in the Old Testament and called attention to his dirty clubs and said, how can this man stand before you, O God, when he is soiled in his turban and in the gown that you have placed upon him?

And God rebuked Satan and said, is this one not a brand snatched from the fire? If you've ever been on a camping trip and you had a cook out there and roasted marshmallows or whatever you did and you wanted to spread up the sticks that you had used for the fire and if you touched them on the end and you look at your hand, your hand will be full.

Of soot.

It will be black from the charred surface of that stick, a brand snatched from the fire. And God said, I snatched him from the fire. Of course he has stains all over his body. Who doesn't have stains all over his body?

Our clothes are dirty even after they had been redeemed from the pit by God. And that gives all kinds of room for Satan to come and accuse us. Now listen, one of the things that Satan does is he brings false accusations against us.

He will accuse us of sins for which we are not guilty. But here's where it gets really complicated. He will also come after us and accuse us of the sins that we are guilty of. Now if the Holy Spirit comes to convict us of sin and Satan comes to accuse us of sin and they're directing their attention at the same sin, how can we tell the difference between the conviction of the Spirit and the accusation of Satan?

I believe that you understand it in the method of operation and the goal. Satan's goal when he accuses us of sin is to drive us to despair, to give us a sense of hopelessness, that yes, we are guilty and there is no escape from our guilt.

Yet when the Holy Spirit comes, as painful as the conviction may be that He brings to pass in our soul, there is still a certain sweetness to it, isn't there? Anybody who's been through this purging process, and every Christian has, knows what I'm talking about, that despite the awful pain of having to fall on your face before God and cry out in your guilt, when you are in the presence of God naked and you know that He is looking at you, even if He has put His hand upon you and broken the bones of your body, you know He's not going to cast you aside.

You know that He is doing this as the father chastens his child that he loves, so you experience the love of God in the midst of the chastening. And you understand that the Spirit never drives us to despair, but rather He is working for our restoration.

And so therein, I think, is the point of David's cry, make me hear joy and gladness that the bones that you have broken may rejoice. He then goes on to say, hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities, again a repetition of the plea for God to blot out the record of the transgressions.

But there's a new element here that I want to look at in our next session, and that is the element of David's plea where he asked God to hide His face from David's sin. And we'll look at that in our next session.